I didn’t take any of this too seriously. To speak and write about politics, people, and culture on a national platform—at Fox and NPR or in books and the Washington Post—is to quickly realize that the blogs, the phones, and the mailbag are going to be filled with criticism. My judgments are constantly questioned, my word choices are scrutinized, and alarms are raised even when things go unsaid. As far as I could tell, the criticism of what I had said on the O’Reilly show had little substance. These attacks amounted to weak, baseless distortions of a fast-paced debate on a difficult subject. Any fair-minded person taking a look at the entire conversation could easily see that my comments had been twisted to serve the political agendas of CAIR and Media Matters. And my conversations with viewers about the show revealed no such confusion, no backlash against my stand in opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry. So I dismissed the whole thing as a minor snit. I’d seen much worse when a powerful politician didn’t like some comment I’d made or when I’d actually misstated a fact of substance in offering an opinion. A lot of that comes with the job, and in some ways it reassures me that people are listening and believe I have influence.
The next day I took the shuttle to New York. A few minutes after I landed in New York, my cell phone rang. A friend at a Washington advocacy group said she wanted to see how I was doing because of the e-mail going around her office calling for me to be fired from NPR for my comments about Muslims on Fox. I thanked her for the support but told her that people with vested interests in any hot-button debate always take shots at me—Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites, Israelis and Palestinians, pro-life and pro-choice.
I went about my work at Fox that day, talking politics as the midterm elections heated up. Shortly after 5:00 p.m., I checked my cell phone and saw that I had a missed call from Ellen Weiss, the vice president of the news division at NPR. When I got her on the phone, she told me she had been inundated with complaints about my comments to O’Reilly on Monday night. Ellen said I had crossed the line and essentially accused me of bigotry. She gave me no chance to tell her my side of the story. She focused on the admission of my fear of people dressed in Muslim garb at the airport as prima facie evidence of my bigotry. She said there are people who wear Muslim garb to work at NPR and they were offended by my comments. She never suggested that I had discriminated against anyone. Instead, Ellen continued to ask me what I had really meant. I told her I had meant exactly what I said. She retorted that she did not sense remorse from me. I said I had nothing to apologize for. I had made an honest statement about my feelings. I urged her to go back and look at the full transcript. Had she done that, she would have seen that I was arguing against exactly the kind of prejudicial snap judgments she was now accusing me of making. But Ellen would hear none of it. She claimed she had reviewed the segment. She informed me that I had violated NPR’s values for editorial commentary and my contract as a news analyst was being terminated.
I was stunned. I said that this was an outrage, that it made no sense. I appealed to her to reconsider before firing me. I asked if she had some personal animus toward me. I pointed out that I had not made my comments on NPR. When she asked if I would have said the same thing on NPR, I said yes, because I believe in telling people the truth about my feelings and opinions, regardless of the venue. I asked why she would fire me without speaking to me face to face and reviewing the entire episode. At that point she bluntly told me there was nothing I could say or do to change her mind. She added that the decision had been confirmed above her and that there was no point in meeting in person. The decision had already been made, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Years earlier, NPR had tried to stop me from appearing on Fox. Some NPR listeners had written to ask why a top NPR personality was showing up on a conservative cable channel. I reminded the management back then that I was working for Fox before NPR signed me to host its afternoon talk show. And I pointed out that other NPR staff appeared on CNN, as well as news discussion shows where they expressed opinions, without any pressure to shut them down. I was told that Fox had grown into the number one cable news network and was a loud, controversial, conservative network at that. My response was that debate on Fox was first rate—that was why the audience was growing—and no one at Fox tried to tell me what to say. I also pointed out that I was advertising the NPR brand with every appearance before Fox’s large audience. Then it was suggested that I not express my opinions on Fox. I said I expressed my opinions every day as an NPR host and I did not say anything on Fox or in my books or newspaper columns that was different from what I said on NPR. Different NPR ombudsmen wrote about the issue over the years and concluded that while having my face on Fox bothered a few at NPR who hated Fox’s conservative approach to the news, it did not amount to a sin against NPR’s standards of journalism.
When Ellen Weiss became NPR’s top news executive, she renewed the discussion about my work for Fox, telling me that she didn’t like Fox’s format. She said its fast-paced debates provoked pointed expression of opinions. On Fox, she observed, liberals are outnumbered by conservatives. I replied that NPR often edited interviews and even debate segments to make them move faster and sharpen contrasting viewpoints. As for the political imbalance she saw on Fox, I asked if she realized that liberals outnumbered conservatives at NPR. She responded that any controversial stand I took on Fox compromised my role as a journalist at NPR. I disagreed. But she outranked me. She insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR employee when I appeared on O’Reilly or any other Fox prime-time show.
To me this was absurd. I thought she was condescending to NPR listeners by suggesting they could not distinguish between my roles at NPR—as a talk show host, correspondent, and analyst—and my role as an occasional debating partner for conservative TV personalities on Fox.
It was the latest in a troubling history of high-ranking NPR editors and producers expressing concern about my journalistic independence because of my role at Fox. Years before that incident, NPR officials asked me to help them get an interview with President George W. Bush. Bush’s top aides felt NPR had been unfair to Bush during the 2000 campaign, and they kept NPR at a distance once Bush was in the White House. But some NPR officials noted that I had long-standing relationships with some of the key players in the Bush White House due to my years as a political writer at the Washington Post. They asked me to take the lead for NPR in trying to get an interview with the president. Later, when other anchors and political reporters asked why I was leading the effort, I heard that some NPR managers suggested that the Bush White House was more likely to grant the interview because of my appearances on Fox. There was an element of petty jealousy that irritated me, but it was also true that the Bush White House had a good relationship with Fox. Over several years I held meetings and set up dinners to try to ease the tensions, and I got several Bush officials to appear on NPR for interviews with me and with others. When it served their purposes, NPR officials were all too happy to use my connection to Fox.
When the president finally agreed to an NPR interview, the offer was for me to interview him. After I did the interview, NPR played it in its entirety that evening on All Things Considered. The next day they devoted an entire segment to it on Morning Edition. The political editors and Weiss, who had helped me script the questions for the president, called and sent e-mails telling me they were thrilled with the interview. But the next day, Weiss phoned me to express anger that in the course of the interview I had prefaced a difficult question about the wars by saying to the president that Americans pray for him but don’t understand some of his actions or policies. Weiss said some NPR staff felt it was wrong to say that Americans pray for him. I reminded her that in many churches it is customary to pray for the well-being of the president, governors, mayors, ministers, and other leaders. She claimed my words amounted to evidence that I was a bad journalist who was soft on Bush.
More than six months later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, President Bush
offered to do an NPR interview with me about race relations in America. NPR management, led by Weiss, refused the interview on the grounds that the White House had offered it to me and not to NPR’s other correspondents and hosts. The implication was that I was in the administration’s pocket. Had the NPR executives never heard my criticism of President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq or his curtailment of civil liberties in the war on terror? Was Weiss unaware that in looking for someone to discuss race relations with the president, the White House might have considered my expertise on the civil rights movement? I am the author of a best-selling history of the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize—America’s Civil Rights Years, as well as an acclaimed biography of America’s first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall—American Revolutionary. My latest book, Enough, was about the state of black leadership in America and had found a place on the New York Times best-seller list. Weiss found it was easier to see me as a shill for the Bush administration. So I did the interview for Fox instead. While it made national headlines, it was never mentioned on NPR.
The shunning got worse when I wrote an editorial column for the New York Times that included criticism of the nation’s teachers’ unions for blocking school reform efforts. Weiss called me to her office to ask how NPR listeners could now trust my reporting on education. I reminded her that I was not the education beat reporter but a news analyst. Weiss was not persuaded. She wanted to review anything I wrote for newspapers, magazines, and even book proposals. When I said absolutely not, she insisted that I leave the staff and sign a new contract that limited my role at NPR to that of a news analyst. She said she wanted to insulate NPR against anything I said or wrote outside NPR. With the new contractual arrangement, she argued, management could claim I was not a staff member.
NPR is an important news outlet with a large, influential audience, and I enjoyed working there. And the NPR audience seemed to appreciate me. I was constantly being asked to visit local NPR stations and meet with listeners as well as staff. The volume of my e-mail, phone calls, letters, and requests for pledge week announcements suggested my pieces got tremendous reaction. The ombudsman said she got more response to my work than to any other voice on the network. I enjoyed my relationship with the audience, so I swallowed hard and accepted Weiss’s deal. I thought my willingness to be a team player and the compromise I’d agreed to would be the end of it. But she immediately began to cut my salary and diminish my on-air appearances. Her management team began to treat me like a leper. I was prohibited from joining a panel of journalists questioning GOP presidential primary candidates in a debate. Senior editors, producers, and hosts told me that Weiss and her circle of other longtime NPR personalities—I worked there ten years and was still considered an outsider—hated Fox and hated me for appearing there. One NPR news executive told me directly that having on staff a black man with conservative social views who was personal friends with conservatives infuriated NPR’s old guard. They were unhappy with Enough, in which I had praised Bill Cosby for his critique of black leaders. It was clear they wanted me out the door, the same executive said, because I did not fit their view of how a black person thinks—my independence of thought, my willingness to listen to a range of views, and my strong journalistic credentials be damned.
This effort to censor, control, and belittle me got so bad I was often ignored even when I gave NPR news tips. Anytime I gave them a scoop, NPR management wanted to know why Bush officials had conversations with me on background—meaning they could not be quoted by name—or with the promise that I would refer to them only generically as senior administration officials. When I replied that this was the way senior officials in Republican and Democratic administrations leaked sensitive information to journalists, Weiss and her team questioned my journalistic standards. The same dismissive attitude came into play as the Obama campaign came into the news. I had better sources among Obama’s aides than anyone else at NPR. When other news organizations broke news of cabinet appointments for the Obama White House, it was often left to me to confirm the news, because no one else at NPR could do it. Yet even then I was treated as a suspect source and asked to reveal the names of sources I used to confirm the nominations. And when I took exclusive stories to NPR, I was told management was not comfortable with my getting exclusive interviews or breaking stories. They preferred that those stories come from other reporters, even if it meant that NPR did not get the stories first.
Yet when Fox let me talk about news from my inside sources, that made NPR leadership boil. After President Obama was elected, there was a lot of conversation in his camp about the upcoming role of his wife, Michelle Obama. Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, I said I had been told by insiders that she would not be a policy adviser to the president but would focus on being an exemplary mom to her daughters. Obama’s staff also said she planned to reach out to military families and to call attention to nutrition and obesity issues among children. I explained that this low-key approach had been planned for the First Lady, a highly opinionated Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer, because the new administration did not want a reprise of the moment during the campaign when Mrs. Obama had become a polarizing, racially charged figure. That episode had been triggered when she said her husband’s success in the primaries made her proud of the United States “for the first time in my adult life.”
Mary Katharine Ham, who was on the O’Reilly show with me that night, referring to Mrs. Obama’s campaign controversy, said the future First Lady had to avoid dropping “sound bites like she did during the campaign.” I added that Mrs. Obama was a potential liability for the president if she stirred racial tensions by getting her “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.” It was a catchy phrase that first came to me during conversations with Obama officials, who laughed at it. But it was reported all over left-wing blogs as an insult to Mrs. Obama. Weiss jumped on the overreaction and told me it was an inappropriate comment for an NPR journalist to make. I was called to the office of Ken Stern, then the acting president of NPR. He listened as I explained what had taken place and decided against censuring me.
But the chilly treatment persisted. When an Obama White House source mentioned that Vice President Biden was the leading critic of continuing the war in Afghanistan, despite growing calls for a “surge” from the military, I tried repeatedly to get NPR interested in the story. Several weeks later, when the same story became page-one news in the New York Times and Washington Post, NPR reported the story but claimed it had no time to air my analysis of this critical debate inside the administration. Similarly, when Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama, my phone started ringing. Kagan had been a clerk at the Supreme Court for liberal icon Justice Thurgood Marshall, and both liberals and conservatives saw political dynamite in that relationship. The Right wanted to paint Kagan as another left-wing activist, while the Obama administration wanted to use her ties to Marshall to reassure its liberal base that Kagan was not a weak moderate about to be steamrolled by conservatives on the court. As a result of my biography of Justice Marshall, requests for interviews poured in to me personally, as well as through the communications department at NPR. Reporters as well as senate staffers, both Democrats and Republicans, wanted to talk to me. But when I pitched NPR’s news division on a news analysis of the story based on my knowledge of the relationship, I was turned down. A week later, an NPR editor called to ask me to do the piece. I was elated. But only hours later she called back to say she had been told there was no room for “a Juan Williams piece.”
At that point I became convinced Weiss and NPR were looking for a reason to fire me. The problem with just getting rid of me was that other NPR staff, including people who worked as straight news reporters, also appeared on opinion and debate TV shows. One news reporter even worked alongside me at Fox—national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Next, NPR management tried to get Liasson to quit Fox and leave me dangling as an aberrant journalist. NPR’s managemen
t asked Liasson to spend a month watching Fox to decide whether it was a legitimate news organization worthy of her time and presence. This request from NPR came at the same time as an Obama White House effort to get other news organizations and the public to view Fox as a propaganda machine rather than a news operation. One news report described the administration’s campaign as an effort to “delegitimize the [conservative] network” and pull the plug on its constant critiques of the president. Liberal columnist Jacob Weisberg wrote in Newsweek that any “respectable journalist—I’m talking to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on [Fox] programs.” A Politico story quoted one NPR executive as saying that “Fox uses Mara and Juan as cover” to counter claims that the network is right-wing and to gain journalistic legitimacy that gives it credibility.
That faulty logic is just a step away from saying that Americans are too stupid to independently judge the slant of news and talk shows and enjoy them for what they are—part of a range of views available in a robust American media. But the most dangerous idea behind the NPR effort to bully Liasson into quitting Fox was that journalists should not talk across the political divide, much less acknowledge that anyone on the other side of that divide might have something interesting or important to say.
Liasson eventually told NPR she saw nothing wrong with Fox and intended to continue working there.
This orthodoxy being applied like a straitjacket to journalists is a chilling attack on the free flow of ideas and debate. No one at Fox has ever told me what to say. The same, sadly, cannot be said of NPR.
As Weiss’s long-standing antagonism toward my appearances on Fox continued to grow, the table was set, waiting for one misguided viewpoint to create a pretext for firing me. When CAIR and Media Matters distorted my comments on the Muslim terror threat, Weiss went to NPR’s new president and CEO, Vivian Schiller, to make the case for getting rid of me.
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